Our home-grown mistreatment of local prisoners

May 13, 2004|By Jean Maclean Snyder,an attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Chicago Law School. She represents clients in lawsuits stemming from incidents that are the subject of this essay (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).

Politicians who are expressing amazement at the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers need a reality check. In Chicago, we need look no further than our own Cook County Jail to see the ease with which guards and accountable officials escape punishment when the mistreatment is local.

In the spring of 2003, accounts of two egregious incidents made headlines in the Chicago Tribune when a jail investigator and two correctional officers came forward to corroborate the prisoners' accounts of the abuse. In one incident, an elite squad of 40 guards took over a maximum-security division of the jail in 1999 for the sole purpose of beating and terrorizing the prisoners. A jail investigator determined that the guards' misconduct was covered up by Cook County medical personnel, who filed false reports and refused or delayed treatment to the prisoners, and by the Cook County inspector general, who refused to cooperate with the investigation. In the other incident, five inmates in a special incarceration unit of the jail alleged that they were beaten by 20 or more officers in 2000 as they lay cuffed and shackled on the floor.

FOR THE RECORD - This story contains corrected material, published May 21, 2004.

When the story about Cook County Jail broke last spring, Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan, who presides over the jail, denied that abuse took place. Nevertheless, he took action that he claimed was "proactive."

He announced he would appoint a three-member panel to study the allegations of abuse and issue a report in the next few months. He also announced that he was suspending Sgt. Richard Remus, the leader of the 40-man squad, and Lt. Edward Byrne, who had led the crew in the 2000 incident. The discipline was for "procedural" errors, though, not for their own actions (and in Byrne's case, he wasn't disciplined for the incident that had made headlines).

What has happened since these announcements? Nothing that anyone except a Cook County politician would call proactive. Lt. Byrne was not fired. Remus got mad and quit. The sheriff's blue-ribbon panel has not been heard from since the sheriff announced its formation. It did not hold public hearings, issue any public statement or deliver a public report.

The soldier who blew the whistle on misconduct in Iraq has been praised by his commanders, but that's not what happened in Cook County. The investigator who exposed the 1999 incident, Charles Holman, has been transferred from his job of investigating misconduct at the jail. Correctional officers Roger Fairley and Richard Gackowski have been forced to quit their jobs and have been unable to find new ones.

The second group of accountable officials is the Cook County Board of Commissioners. The board did not punish any of the medical personnel who the investigator had found to have falsified documents or then-Cook County Inspector General Timothy Flick, who had thumbed his nose at the jail investigation. (Flick left Cook County last year to join the Office of Homeland Security in Texas, but his name should ring a bell with the county commissioners. In January a federal jury in Chicago awarded one of Flick's employees $500,000 for the sexual harassment she had endured from Flick while he headed the inspector general's office; $100,000 of that award must be paid by Cook County.)

Instead, like Sheahan, the County Board called for an investigation of the jail. At its request, Chief Criminal Court Judge Paul Biebel Jr. convened a grand jury and announced the appointment of former Cook County Circuit Judge Thomas Hett to lead its investigation. Yet, a year later, the grand jury has produced neither indictments nor a report.

The third official who bears responsibility is Cook County State's Atty. Richard Devine. He could have prosecuted the guards when the beatings occurred in 1999 and 2000 but declined to do so at the time and again in 2003, when he cited problems of credibility and conflicting testimony. Shortly thereafter, though, he announced that he would indict a Cook County Jail guard for brutality. Trouble is, the guard was charged with kicking his dog, not with beating an inmate. Evidently "Fido" was the perfect victim: nobody would contradict his last bark and he didn't have a rap sheet.

While Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is being threatened with losing his job and soldiers in Iraq are facing courts-martial, the Cook County Jail guards and accountable officials who made headlines a year ago are sleeping easy.

The same cannot be said for the jail's prisoners. Last month, I interviewed a prisoner who said he was beaten unconscious by guards who had wrapped handcuffs around their fists to make the beating worse. When I met with the prisoner several days later, the whites of his eyes were nearly obscured by the red from blood vessels that had ruptured during the beating, and deep lacerations were held together by staples that had been applied to his scalp. Late last year I visited another prisoner who told of being dragged by several guards through a fire of burning paper and debris that had been raging in the cellblock. His account of this abuse was substantiated by blisters and deep burn marks on his leg.

Perhaps the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners will make Americans take a second look at how we treat our own prisoners. When that happens, there is no place to start like our home in Cook County.